Poker tournaments are basically just like a normal poker ring game but with some differences. In poker tournaments you pay a fixed buy-in to participate and you get a certain quantity of poker chips. The poker chips you are given has no cash value and you are not allowed to play with any cash during the tournament. But in some tournaments you can buy more chips called re-buy.

When a poker player has no poker chips left and has no more re-buys left he is out of the poker tournament and to keep the numbers of players even on all poker tables in the poker tournament, the players are moved around. If a poker table has too few players, players from other poker tables will b moved to that table or an entire table will be taken out of play and all the players from that table will be placed on other tables where they are needed.

In a poker tournament you will not win money from your opponents as you play and win pots, the money is a big prize pool and the players who are placed in the money will be paid. The other players are given nothing.

On some online poker sites you will find huge tournaments especially on the bigger and more popular sites, for instance there is a tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $1 000 000 every Sunday on PokerStars. These big poker tournaments attract many players and the buy-in to poker tournaments like this can be quite expensive but for most big tournaments there are so called satellites which you can qualify through. Satellites are much cheaper than to pay the buy-in for the poker tournament but as this is a smaller tournament you are not guaranteed a place in the bigger poker tournament and in poker satellites there is no cash prize, only tickets to other poker tournaments.

There are also very big poker tournaments live with enormous prize pools and they are very popular. But it is not only money at stake in these poker tournaments, there is also very much honor in these prestigious tournaments as well as it is in online poker tournaments.